Earlier today, I had a need for an XPath evaluator. I had an enormous XML document that I wanted to execute an XPath query against.

I turned to Google… surprisingly enough, this type of utility appears to be very uncommon. I found only a few hits.

One for this web application thing that I remember seeing a while back. This was undesirable to me, because I didnt want to create a VROOT and install a web application to process some XML.

Another was for what looks like a pretty cool xml editor (Stylus Studio). Although this looks very cool, and worthy of a second look in the future, at this time I did not want to install a full fledged xml editor just to run an XPath query.

Ultimately, I stumbled across this small console application called XPQ by Craig Andera. Drawback? You have to compile it, but hey, I can deal with that. :=)

Once you compile it, you run it like this:

xpq <xpath> <input-file>

For example, to get the number of “foo” nodes from a document:

xpq count(//foo) doc.xml

This is the simplicity and power I was looking for. Great job, Craig, and thank you.